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My Notes from OSDEVCON2008

I and several guys from our G11n team had a chance to visit OpenSolaris Developer Conference (OSDEVCON2008). This was the 2nd year of the conference and it was held from Jun 25 - Jun 27 in Prague. The first day (Wednesday) was focused on Tutorials, Thu and Fri on Presentations. Video and slides will be available at program page of OSDEVCON. The G11n Prague team introduced a presentation about 'Translation of OpenSolaris' - new pilot project focusing to end-to-end process of translation of SW messages and documentation in one place.

Several key features of the project were introduced:

It covers end-to-end process of OS.o translation - it means the entire process from entering translation, saving translated strings, updating translation memory, building packages, installation to target machine and test the translation. The intention was to focus on translation delivery back to the SW via online building of IPS packages and having experimental network repository.

It covers translation of SW messages coming from different projects - e.g. OpenSolaris ON, JDS, installer messages, Online help. Currently there is no one place where all SW OS.o messages are stored.

It may cover translation of SW messages and documentation in one place.

This should enable online as well as offline translation

It can leverage rich functionality from World server (e.g. segmentation, shared translation memory, etc.) - a solution used internally.

The online demo was shown at the end of the presentation and everybody could see online translation of calendar CLI utility in 5 minutes, including installation to OpenSolaris 2008.05 box used for presentation. However this is just prototype - or proof of concept. It would require a discussion to move forward.

After a presentation we got a lot of questions regarding to localization of OpenSolaris and the pilot project. I took some notes I'd like to share. Some of them were answers to questions from audience:

I could count approx. 70 participants. 9 of them came from G11n organization. Many visitors came from different countries: Ireland, Germany, US, ...

We, as a team, should be more open to community and move our non-confidential discussion from internal aliases to external ones. It is very difficult to build the community behind firewall.

Even this was Developer conference, people were interested a lot how non-core developers can contribute to OS.o, especially how to
translate.

Current demo and new packages built are not aware of IPS content filtering introduced by IPS team. The filters and Package Manager can provide language-specific installation of specific program in future. This will influence current localeadm tool functionality which is not available in Indiana.

We should make our external tools transparent. Translated messages and documentations should be put back to upstream.

Current translation of SW ON messages (Solaris command line utilities) into Czech took approximately 6 months by 4 people working 10 hours per week.

There is no deadline or schedule for the prototype introduced in a demo, however more formalized proposal (onepager) will come soon.

This conference was very good opportunity to met many folks from and especially outside Sun and know their opinions.

I totally agree with your comments: "We, as a team, should be more open to community and move our non-confidential discussion from internal aliases to external ones. It is very difficult to build the community behind firewall."

Fully agree with Janice and Ales! And it's pretty easy thing to do at the end. Opening our discussion and processes to external aliases help to build trust. It's also a good way to verify if our processes are well designed and simple enough. If opening a particular process or explaining it to people out of Sun is difficult; it's likely because this process is too complicated! So? Simplify it! ;)
Great post Ales, it's nice way to get information about this event for those we didn't attend.